6 Resources for the Powerful Drupal Content Management System
by Sam Dean - Feb. 18, 2009Comments (0)- Related Blog Posts
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Without a doubt, the open source project Drupal is one of the most robust content management systems (CMS) around. It provides the infrastructure and manages processes for many well-known web sites, including The Onion and OStatic. In our interview with Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal, he said that there are 700 core contributors to the project, which he described as on the "same scale as the Linux kernel." There are also over 2,000 modules for Drupal, making it hugely extensible. Since OStatic's inception, we've collected many good resources for both getting started with Drupal, and extending its functionality if you already use it. Here are six great resources, including interviews with Drupal insiders.
A Drupal Honcho. Angela Byron is one of Drupal's top evangelists, a Drupal community manager and core committer, and sits on Drupal's board. Check out our extensive interview with her, where she discusses interface and design improvements coming for Drupal, and much more.
A Free Book Chapter. John K. VanDyk is author of one of the most respected books for Drupal power users: Pro Drupal Development. The book is an exhaustive guide to how to build powerful, customized web sites. Here is a link to the complete Table of Contents and also the first chapter of the book, (PDF), provided for OStatic by John.
Input from the Author. We also interviewed Drupal author John VanDyk here. He provides specific examples on how modules are built for Drupal, and describes what users can get out of his book.
Free Tips and More. If you're getting into Drupal, also get into Lullabot, which we wrote about here. A provider of training and consulting for Drupal, Lullabot has consulted with such companies as MTV, Sony BMG Records, Lifetime Television, IBM, and Fast Company in building and growing their Drupal sites. The best news is that they provide a lot of free, educational content about Drupal, including excellent podcasts. Here's one on Drupal tips and tricks. You can also get educational DVDs and more from Lullabot.
Help Me. Do you need support for a Drupal deployment? We've covered Acquia before, which offers a commercially supported version of Drupal and sells support subscriptions and other services. (Disclosure: Acquia is an OStatic sponsor.)
Is Drupal Right for Me? If you're planning a web site, whether it's a database-driven site, a blog, a combination of the two (which OStatic is), or something else, you may want to evaluate whether Drupal is right for you. Check out Kristin's post here for first steps. A good next step would be to to try OpenSourceCMS, which we wrote about here. It lets you function as an administrator of Drupal and other CMS offerings for hours, so you get a strong sense of all capabilities. Also, check out the many free tutorial videos on Drupal available here.
We hope you find some good insight into Drupal in this post. It's not an accident that we picked it to power OStatic. Few open source projects result in such a rich, incredibly extensible platform.
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